Chapter 11 Part C
conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity (Rubens)
What followed, in the
West, was the rise of the early Christian Church. Did Christianity grow strong
because it offered a way out of the ennui of life in the late Roman Empire? Or
did it just happen to coincide with that ennui? All that is certain is that the
decline of the Romans' old beliefs and the rise of the monotheistic,
compassionate Christian ones happened at the same time. To the Romans of
Constantine's day, it all just seemed "right", as needed social
changes do. All the peoples of the Empire began then to built a society based
on a more spiritual view of the universe, a view under which material rewards
and sensual pleasures were to be disregarded. Eternal salvation was what
mattered.
Under this worldview, Earth was
the center of the universe, specially created by God to house man, His most beloved
creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life to whatever degree he could (as
the ancients had) in this garden turned, by man's sin, to a barren plain.
Man was here to praise God and gratefully accept all that God sent man’s way,
all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what
mattered. This sounds like a backward step, and in many ways it was.
But Christianity added some useful
ideas of its own. Each Christian was taught to act humanely toward all other
people, to behave honestly and compassionately in his dealings with them, and
to commit in a deeply personal way to Christ's kind of faith and his compassionate
way of life. Christians learned to live most of the time as if being kind to
all other humans was a desirable, moral way to be, even if any particular act
of kindness might not get us any rewards in this lifetime.
This was a huge
change from the ways of the slave-owning, gladiator-loving, sensual, militaristic,
mid-Empire Romans. Why the Church later got to be so cynical as to conduct wars
and own property, while the individual serf was not to even contemplate such
things, unless the pope told him to make war on the heathens, became vague. But
the grip of Christianity's good ideas was so strong that the hypocritical
authorities, for centuries, found ways to manage ordinary people's perceptions
around the Church's inconsistencies.
For
twelve centuries, the Church's explanations of the whole universe and human
experience in it were adequate to develop and retain a large following for the
Church and the values and morés it endorsed, which was all that mattered.
Christian communities, over and over, enjoyed long terms of growing prosperity
because they were stable, even though they were not very progressive by modern
standards. After the chaos that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire,
stability meant a great deal.
The behaviors these values
produced had seemed effete to most of the citizens of the middle Roman Empire.
What was this "Crysteanism" that was stealing their children into its
cult! The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers. But that
system, which gave legal status to all humans (even serfs had rights), mutual
support through all tribulations (aid during war, famine, and plague), and
honesty in all dealings (God was always watching!) proved superior to the Roman
one in the final test. More and more people, especially young people, became dissatisfied
with what had become the Roman way of life, one that offered material comfort,
physical pleasure, and little else. Meaninglessness.
Christianity
offered something else, a more spiritual worldview, one that felt personal,
and a way of life that made sense because it was what God had clearly said he
wanted of us and because, over the long term, it fostered a kinder, more
inclusive society. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to the mid-Empire
Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as Christians were fed to lions, it nevertheless assimilated the old Roman system under which it had arisen. Its ideas didn’t just sound nice; over millions of people
and hundreds of years, they worked.
The loss of much of the Roman's
practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, along with a lack
of any strong form of humanism, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide
until the Renaissance. Then these more worldly values were re-born due to a
number of factors too familiar to scholars (i.e. the fall of Constantinople, the
rise of Science, the discovery of the America’s, etc.) to need further
description. Or perhaps, in another view, we could say that the Christian way,
which asked every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society's
levels of overall economic efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western
civilization called the “Renaissance” inevitable. The new hybrid values system
worked. Greek knowledge, Roman practical skills, in a Christian social mileu.
Hanseatic League city of Lubeck
Western culture finally
integrated its most fundamental values systems, Classical and Christian. It
took over a thousand years for people who lived lives that focused on worldly
matters, instead of only on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be
seen as moral citizens in the eyes of the community.
To
be clear, we should also say that the Renaissance artists,
scientists, merchants, and explorers gradually came to see their own worldly
achievements as ways of glorifying God. It just took them a long time to
convince the majority of other citizens that making useful, profitable, and
beautiful things in this material world could be a good way of living for a
true Christian.
However, handling the physical world, by Commerce, Science and
Art did gradually become acceptable as a way to serve God. The world views,
values, morés and behavior patterns, i.e. the total culture package of
Christianity, with the value it placed on every individual human being, was finally
integrated in a functional way with the knowledge, abstract and practical, that
had been passed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans. That breakthrough
unleashed a deluge. Individuals who defied convention began to prove that they
could be unbelievably valuable to the greater community, even if, at first,
they did upset people.
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